The Author's Preface

Dickens wrote this preface for the third edition of 1841 and added to it in 1850. It is given here in his voice, condensed.

Some people of refinement have been shocked that I should choose some of my characters from the most criminal and degraded of London's population. I confess I see no reason why the very dregs of life, so long as their speech does not offend the ear, should not serve the purpose of a moral as well as its froth and cream. I wanted to show, in little Oliver, the principle of good surviving through every adverse circumstance and triumphing at last.

In the books I had read, thieves were nearly always seductive fellows — gallant, well dressed, lucky with their horses and bold with the ladies. I had never met one like that. It seemed to me that to paint a band of such criminals as they really are — skulking through the dirtiest paths of life, with the great black gallows closing their prospect, turn where they may — would be a service to society. I have tried to do it, softening nothing but the language, which I could not reproduce without offending the reader.

It has been objected to Nancy that her devotion to the brutal housebreaker is unnatural. To this I can only say: it is true. Every man who has watched these melancholy shades of life knows it to be so. I have seen it many times. And it is a contradiction, an anomaly, an apparent impossibility, but it is a truth. It is emphatically God's truth, for it is the truth He leaves in such depraved and miserable breasts — the last fair drop of water at the bottom of the weed-choked well.

When the scene of Sikes's death was published, a gentleman in public office assured the world that Jacob's Island did not exist and never had. It existed then, and it exists still, though it is somewhat improved; and I refer any doubter to it.